The Gender of Public Opinion

As contributors to Mass-Observation, Naomi Mitchison and Celia Fremlin emphasize the important, and often undervalued, role of qualitative analysis in the assessment of public opinion throughout their fiction. While the British Institute for Public Opinion often excluded women as both researchers and research subjects, Mass-Observation’s (M-O) structure was more open to input from women as both observers and subjects of observation. After she touted the political value of mathematics in her Greek-inspired short story collection The Delicate Fire, Mitchison uses her novel We Have Been Warned to imbue more skepticism about the egalitarian value of statistical analysis; the protagonist, Dione Galton, learns only too late that her own instincts about the rise of fascism in England, ventriloquized through the ghost Green Jean, were far more accurate than the polling cards she used to predict her husband’s eventual electoral defeat. Likewise, Celia Fremlin’s postwar novel, The Hours Before Dawn, validates the supposedly irrational fears of her protagonist, Louise Henderson, who must contend with patronizing experts in her effort to thwart the violent impulses of her new tenant Vera Brandon. Both novels, influenced by the authors’ experiences working for M-O, contend that quantitative analysis alone is insufficient to capture the complexity of women’s wartime experiences. This chapter argues that the contributions of M-O researchers and novelists like Fremlin and Mitchison present the possibility of a road untrodden in the history of social psychology research, as the fetishizaton of data over experience eventually drowned out the possibilities of more holistic and qualitative methods.